For Antiwar.com and Chaos Radio 95.9 in Austin, Texas, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Antiwar Radio.
And I'm happy to welcome Glenn Greenwald back to the show.
He's keeping the left honest over there at salon.com slash opinion slash Greenwald.
And it doesn't seem to matter who's in power.
He's still just as sure that the Bill of Rights is the law of the United States.
Isn't that strange?
Welcome back to the show, Glenn.
How are you doing?
Doing great.
Always glad to be back, Scott.
Now, isn't it the case that when the parties switch power, that the Bill of Rights means something entirely different than it used to or something?
No?
Yeah, it's like when your party is in power, the Bill of Rights contracts with this tiny, impossible document.
And when your party is out of power, it expands into the massive impediment on administration.
I think that's how it works.
Yeah, well, it sure seems to in the minds of, well, I don't know, the commenters on your blog.
I saw where you were defending not Ann Coulter, but the right of human beings to say what they want without the threat of prison.
And then I read the comments section and everybody said, oh, come on, Glenn Greenwald, you're all wet.
Everybody knows that right wingers who say what I don't like ought to have to go to jail.
Well, what was remarkable about that was a couple of things.
First of all, I had written about hate speech laws before, before Obama was inaugurated.
And there will be some people, progressives, who would essentially support laws like that, but they were in the distinct minority.
And this is really the first time I had written about hate speech laws since Obama was inaugurated.
And the number of progressives willing to defend hate speech laws had increased astronomically, I think, because people are much more receptive, as we just suggested, to investing the government with all kinds of tyrannical power when it's their party that's in office.
So I think, you know, two years ago, the idea of allowing the government to imprison people for their political viewpoints was something that progressives were horrified by because they weren't in control of the levers of power.
Whereas now that they are in control of the levers of power, they're comfortable with the idea, you know, we're talking generally, I mean, lots aren't, but many are, with the idea that the government should be empowered to punish people for saying things that the government disapproves of because they are comfortable that it will be directed at people they don't like rather than at people they do like.
I found the change in that regard pretty revealing and disturbing.
And the other thing about it is, you know, it's often the case that if Americans defend criticisms that are launched at them by other countries over things like torture and wars and the like, they get their hackles up and they insist that America is good and right and they get accused, I think, appropriately and accurately, of jingoism or nationalism or engaging in this form of American exceptionalism.
It's amazing, every time I write about, you know, Canada or Europe in any kind of critical way, the number of Canadians who pop up to insist that their country is the beacon of freedom and should never be criticized is quite remarkable, and it's really a form of Canadian jingoism and Canadian nationalism and Canadian exceptionalism that you start to see emerge as well, and I find that pretty interesting also.
Yeah, well, somehow you're immune from this, though.
I mean, I know that you at least somewhat supported Obama, certainly you preferred him to John McCain, I don't know if you voted for him or not, and yet somehow you hold him to the exact standard that you held George Bush and Dick Cheney to.
So what's the matter with you?
I actually don't understand how, I mean, it's not like I have to take any steps in order to do that.
I mean, I know what I was writing two years ago and three years ago and the policies that I was condemning very harshly, and I know that my readers remember that as well, and I wrote books about it and the like.
So when I watch Barack Obama endorse and embrace and adopt exactly those same policies, that only two years ago I was demonly condemning, I don't actually feel like I have a choice about whether or not I should condemn Obama for embracing those same policies, because I would feel like my credibility would be instantaneously and justifiably destroyed if I did anything other than that.
I mean, for me, I was never criticizing George Bush because he's a Republican or a conservative, and I don't like Republicans or conservatives.
I was criticizing George Bush because the policies that he was adopting were tyrannical and destructive.
And so if I were to do anything different as I watch Barack Obama adopt those very same policies, I would be horrified of myself, and I would expect, naturally, anybody who had ever been reading me to be equally horrified as well.
So it doesn't even occur to me not to do that, and I honestly don't understand how the human brain can allow a person to scream bloody murder and allege that the Constitution is being destroyed because George Bush is adopting a whole slew of policies, and then a few years later watch as Barack Obama does the same thing and not only not scream bloody murder but find excuses and justifications for it.
I actually find it difficult to comprehend intellectually and emotionally and psychologically how a person could get themselves to do it, and yet, as you know, it's quite common and pervasive.
All right, now, so let's talk about, in a little bit more specificity here, about what Obama is doing that's so objectionable.
I know that one of the things that you've written about time and again is his statement that we must look forward, not back, and that's the euphemism for no accountability for any war criminals from the last administration, and yet Eric Holder, the attorney general, did basically, I guess, instruct a prosecutor named Durham, who was already investigating the tapes, the CIA tapes of torture that were destroyed and an obstruction of justice case there and had a grand jury, I guess, already, instructed him to look into, at least to some degree, ordered him to create a preliminary investigation to see if there should be a criminal investigation of, for example, lawyers in the Office of Legal Counsel who helped legalize the torture regime or CIA agents who perhaps went beyond the memos and actually tortured somebody to death, which I guess was against the rules or something.
So is there actually, despite the kind of lack of coverage of it, is there really some looking back going on now?
Is there a possibility that this guy Durham could convene a real grand jury on this torture stuff and that we might see some prosecutions or not a chance?
Well, it depends what you mean by the rule of law.
What happens is if elites and the politically powerful break the law to such an extreme degree that there has to be something done just to maintain appearances, typically what happens is that they find low-level scapegoats to pay a price and claim that they're rogue criminals who were off doing these things without any authorization.
Of course, that's what happened with Abu Ghraib, where we know, and even a Senate investigative committee determined, that the practices at Abu Ghraib that received so much controversy and attention were ones that were the direct byproduct of what the Bush administration at the highest levels wanted to transplant from Guantanamo to Abu Ghraib, that there was a General Jeffrey Miller who went from Guantanamo to the prisons in Iraq in order to, quote, unquote, gypnolize them.
And so it was at the highest level of policy that the abuses of Abu Ghraib occurred, and yet the only reason why that became a controversy was because there were photographs, horrible, vulgar photographs that couldn't be evaded.
I mean, you couldn't have photographs like that surface and do nothing.
So they found a few low-level privates and corporals, you know, Lindy England and the like, and said, oh, these people did this on their own.
They were rogue criminals, and they were prosecuted and punished a little bit.
So that kind of thing happens, and that's consistent with the non-application of the rule of law that we have for scapegoats.
And so what the Holder Justice Department is doing is there are extraordinarily severe, brutal cases where people were basically beaten to death while in U.S. custody and absolutely brutalized, either close to death or to death, where, again, it's essentially the version of Abu Ghraib.
It's so extreme that you can't just do nothing and maintain appearances.
So what Holder has done is, first of all, as he said, he didn't commence an investigation.
He actually just asked John Durham to commence a preliminary investigation to see if a real investigation should take place.
But what he did even worse than that was he explicitly instructed him that anybody who complied with the torture memos that the Justice Department wrote shall be immune from prosecution.
The only people who might be prosecuted are individual interrogators who tortured beyond the torture permission slips that they received from the Justice Department, essentially, again, claiming that they're rogue interrogators who went beyond the torture guidelines established by the Justice Department.
The real war crimes were the authorization and official sanctioning of torture itself.
But Holder has placed all of that off limits and has said, perhaps we will, in the most extreme cases where people transgress those boundaries, prosecute them.
So I don't consider that a vindication of the rule of law.
I actually consider it a subversion of the rule of law.
But to answer your question directly, there is a little looking back going on in terms of trying to find a scapegoat, but there's no genuine looking back in terms of accountability.
Well, now, Justice Department aside, Barack Obama now has the authority to assassinate all the members of the previous administration who committed war crimes, right?
Well, he claims for himself the authority to assassinate American citizens far from a battlefield who he says are So does Wyoming count?
Well, the battlefield is the entire world.
There are no geographical limits to the battlefield.
So everywhere counts.
So drone strikes on the Cheney family, if ordered by the commander in chief, would be perfectly legal.
Right.
I don't think it's particularly likely because the Cheney family doesn't seem to be a target of the president, unfortunately.
And by target, I mean not for assassination, but in any regard, including prosecution.
But theoretically, the president's claim of his own power is that he can assassinate or the assassination of American citizens, even away from a battlefield, based on his mere suggestion that they're enemy combatants.
So there would be no limits on that power that I know.
Well, and they've even, I guess, specified that there are at least three Americans on the list right now.
An American Somali who went, or Somali-American or whichever, who went to Somalia, supposedly.
And Anwar al-Awlaki, or however you say his name.
I mean, they're announcing that we have American citizens who are overseas right now on our list that we'll just kill.
Well, and the interesting case of Anwar al-Awlaki, which you just mentioned, who's a Yemeni-American who was born in the United States and is an American citizen who is now in Yemen.
The allegation there is not that al-Awlaki ever actually engaged himself in a terrorist plot, but that instead he has expressed the opinion, the political opinion, that Muslims are justified in attacking the United States.
Really, he has confined his opinions to attacking military installations in the United States because the United States continues to attack targets, including civilians, in the Muslim world.
So he, for instance, is alleged to have spoken with Nidal Hassan, who attacked the Fort Hood military facility in Texas, as well as with the so-called Christmas Day bomber, Abd al-Muttalib, and is essentially charged without—not formally charged, but just accused informally of encouraging those two individuals to embark upon the attempted acts that they engaged in by essentially providing the intellectual justification.
Well, we have Supreme Court cases that say that advocating violence, even just in theory, saying that violence is justified, is protected by the First Amendment.
And yet the only thing that he's alleged to have done, this American citizen, is express the views and give encouragement to engage in violence against Americans on the grounds that it's justifiable.
And yet not only is the Obama administration looking to claim that he's a criminal, they're looking to murder him with no charges, no trial of any kind, far away from a battlefield.
I mean, that is truly pernicious.
Well, you know, today on The American Conservative, and I think we're linking to it on AntiWar.com, there's a deep background piece by Philip Giraldi where he emphasizes along this line that when Admiral Blair testified before the Congress that, yes, we have this assassination program, that he used the term involvement for, you know, if someone is involved with terrorists, then that's good enough to kill them, which is sort of, I mean, even right there, they're defining the guilt down to the lowest level imaginable.
Well, this has always been the great difficulty with allowing the executive branch to make determinations about who is and who is not a quote-unquote terrorist without any review or standards of any kind, which is that the government thinks that anybody who opposes it is, by definition, a terrorist.
All governments think that.
That's been true for as long as we have recorded history.
And there are all kinds of examples of the Pentagon and of the FBI and the CIA targeting domestic groups that simply oppose government policy on the grounds that they're a national security threat, because that's how governments think.
And so if you allow the government to eavesdrop on people or to tame them indefinitely or to murder them simply based on the accusation that they're involved with terrorists or even that they're just even more specifically that they're terrorists, you're inevitably ensuring that there will be abuse.
And the vaguer and more amorphous the standard is, and as Geraldo suggested, can actually be something like connected to terrorism or somehow involved in it, then you start expanding the scope of who is and who is not a terrorist to such an extreme degree that literally anyone can be included.
And that's why we have checks and balances to prevent that kind of abuse.
Well, we've seen where some of the people arrested, I guess these are state terrorism laws, but still people arrested protesting at the RNC-8 were charged with terrorism.
And you talk about expanding the definition.
I don't know if you've been watching MSNBC lately, but according to MSNBC, best I can tell, anybody who is a populist right-winger is a member of the radical right, and they're basically the militia.
And you know how the militia is.
They did the Oklahoma bombing.
And ask Rachel Maddow, anybody to the right of you is a domestic terrorist, or at least is a likely one.
Well, it's interesting.
I was actually on the Rachel Maddow show in the immediate aftermath of the attack by Joseph Stack on the IRS building in Texas, the individual who flew his plane into the side of the building.
And there was a Republican congressman, King, from Iowa, who started to say things like, well, we ought to think about why somebody would want to do that and what causes somebody to be so angry with the IRS or the federal government that they would fly their plane to the side of a building.
And her argument basically was that by talking about the causes of that kind of an attack, he was essentially justifying or endorsing terrorism because he was saying that someone might have a potential reason for doing that, or we ought to think about what the reasons are, why somebody would be driven to that.
Now, of course, this was the way that...
Well, that comes from all the shaking over here.
Right.
That was the way that neocons tried for years to completely demean anybody on the left or on the right who said things like, you know what, we ought to think about whether their grievances that Muslim terrorists have are legitimate and whether we're doing things to contribute to those grievances.
And the fact that we say things like we ought to think about why they hate us and why they're attacking us doesn't mean that we're justifying the terrorism or the violence.
It just means that we want to understand whether what we're doing is contributing to the cause.
And, of course, the left insisted for a long time upon the right to make those kinds of...raise those kinds of questions and not to be accused of encouraging or justifying terrorism by doing so.
And yet the first minute somebody does the same thing with a quote-unquote right-wing terrorist, then suddenly they're accused of the same thing.
And, you know, we had a little discussion about why that was inappropriate and inconsistent.
So, you know, I mean, the reality is that there is no definition of terrorism.
That's why I write frequently that it's the most manipulated and meaningless word.
It's always in the eye of the beholder.
You know, there's all kinds of outrage going on because the Palestinians supposedly named the public square after somebody who had engaged in violence against Israeli civilians, and that proves that they're encouraging and glorifying terrorism of the Israelis.
You go to Israel and you see public squares named after Menachem Begin, who, of course, engage in all kinds of terrorist acts in order to create an Israeli state.
And so this is the kind of game plan that goes on constantly with the word, and it's why it's such a dangerous and manipulated term.
Yeah.
Well, you know, even just take the base definition of the current campaign, Cheney's grim vision, as the Seattle Times called it, a generation, two, three generations of permanent warfare.
From the very beginning, it was obvious to anybody who wanted to be critical about it that they didn't name it the war on Al-Qaeda.
They didn't name it the war to get Ayman al-Zawahiri.
They named it the war on terrorism, which brought up the question, are we going to invade Ireland, and how far is this going to go?
And what it's obviously really meant was the neoconservatives got to define all of Israel's enemies as part and parcel of the same thing, as our problem with Al-Qaeda.
Well, this has been going on actually for a long time, and I actually interviewed someone by the name of Remy Berlin, who is teaching at NYU and getting his Ph.
D. at the Sorbonne, and his Ph.
D. dissertation is on how the term terrorism has been used over the past 50 years by lesser nations and the failed effort to settle upon a definition.
And what he really highlights and documents amazingly clearly is that the whole idea of terrorism and trying to define it as some clear and definitive and universal term really began in the early 70s with the Israelis trying to universalize their dispute with the PLO and with their Arab neighbors to try and call what those enemies of theirs were doing terrorism and then to try to universalize the term by insisting that it wasn't just they who were fighting this menace, but also lesser nations in order to make it everybody's problem.
And that's essentially what we've ended up doing is universalizing the various disputes that the Israelis have under the guise of terrorism, and you see that over and over.
And that's why it's very dangerous to say we're going to revamp our entire political system based upon any kind of a fear, but when it's something so amorphous and so manipulated as the term terrorism, it becomes infinitely worse.
All right.
Now, I'm sorry to ask you such a general question, but we've got a few minutes here, and I'm just interested in what's your take on what's going on between the United States and Israel right now?
Well, on the one hand, I think it's an overstatement to say, as some people are, that this is just pure theater, that it's actually completely meaningless, that it's just all engineered, because whatever else is true, there's clearly hard feelings on each side, and it's not actually good for the Netanyahu government to have the United States be so openly critical.
I think what else is going on that is not fully appreciated is there are a lot of people who don't much care, who have never cared in the past about questioning U.S. policy toward Israel, but who are very loyal to Barack Obama and who view anyone who they view as a critic or an impediment or an opponent of Obama's as being the enemy.
And having Israel and the Netanyahu government be perceived, even if it's just symbolic and theatrical, as an opponent of Obama, I think is causing a lot of people who never felt this way before to start thinking negatively about Israel and to question whether or not they really deserve the deference and the protection that they've been getting.
And I see the debate opening up much more so than ever before.
And so I actually am very skeptical of this idea that, oh, this is just all for show, and the parties are just manufacturing this conflict, and it doesn't really mean much, because the Israelis have always been very careful about not allowing anything negative to be said about them in mainstream American political debates.
And over the past couple of months, you've seen much more negativity in American political discussion than you ever have before.
That is not something that they want.
And I also think that the anger and the annoyance is very real, not for any substantive reasons, but because the Americans just feel insulted that this was done when Biden was in Israel.
Having said that, there's been no change in policy whatsoever.
And until there's a change in policy where we actually start withdrawing our aid to the Israelis ceasing to protect them with diplomatic protection at the U.N. and using our veto power to allow them to do anything they want and withdrawing our loan guarantees, until that happens, there is no real rift.
Then it is just on the rhetorical and symbolic level.
So we're certainly not anywhere near where we can call the rift genuine.
There's been no policy changes of any kind.
But at the same time, I don't think it's accurate to think about it as meaningless either.
I think the first step toward changing our policy toward Israel is causing people more and more to realize how damaging our relationship with them is.
And I think that these past couple of weeks, inadvertently or not, has been an important first step towards that.
Everybody, that's Glenn Greenwald.
He's a former constitutional litigator.
And he blogs at salon.com slash opinion slash Greenwald.
It'll forge on to the new address anyway.
And his books are called How Would a Patriot Act, A Tragic Legacy, and Great American Hypocrites.
And I read his blog every day.
I keep the window open here.
And I hope you will as well.
Thank you very much for your time, Glenn.
My pleasure.
Thanks, Scott.
